Learning to Listen
By Jessica Graves
Years ago I took a group of teens from the Village Free School to the Shambala Center in Southeast Portland. Being out with students was one of my favorite parts of working at VFS, as was the opportunity to share with them parts of my life. Buddhism has long played an important role in my life—the practice grounding me in my most chaotic moments, the philosophy helping me to understand the world around me. That school year I had been visiting the Shambala Center before and after work to sit in meditation, rewire my brain, reign in my mind.
When we arrived we were welcomed by Jon, a slight man in his late forties with a gentle voice. He gave our group a small tour before inviting us to settle on cushions in a small circle in the meditation room.
“So,” he began, “what do you already know about meditation?”
The students shared what they knew and Jon filled in the blanks, sharing his own experience of meditation and techniques that could be helpful in teaching the mind to rest. He then suggested we sit for a short session, after which students compared notes on what they noticed in themselves. During this reflection, Jon told us about the Four Kinds of Listening:
Not Listening
Listening Only for Your Turn to Speak
Listening to Understand
Listening to Enable another person’s wisdom
“Meditation,” he said, “is a kind of listening to yourself.”
***
In Alone with Others; an Existential Approach to Buddhism, Stephen Batchelor explores the dichotomy between Having and Being. Having is a horizontal realm. It is a constant widening, reaching out, and gathering of things, be they material goods or status or relationships. Being, however, is a vertical realm. It is a reaching in, a deepening, the awakening of an awareness and understanding.
Communication, like so many other things, falls into both realms. Having good communication skills—being succinct in your emails or comfortable with public speaking, for example—can get you a job or a promotion or a raise; expressing a thought that resonates with others—in person, in print, on social media—can gain you recognition and status. To be in communication with others, though, is not so much a skill as it is a practice in listening.
It's easy to say that listening is a key to truly communicating. Just as easy as it was for my students and I to imagine, as Jon explained the distinctions in listening, a conversation in which we weren’t really paying attention to what was being said, or a time when we were so focused on what we wanted to say that we missed the full meaning of what a friend was telling us.
The hard part, of course, is learning to actually listen, and it's hard for the same reason that meditation is hard: it's a slowing down, a refocusing of your mind and energy. When I was growing up, my parents often asked me, “What's really going on?” It was usually in response to some big emotion I was having and I was usually annoyed by it; I didn't want to stop to analyze my feeling, I just wanted to feel it. What they were giving me, though, was that time to pause, to reflect, to understand more about who I was by understanding the roots of my reactions.
Our relationships are strengthened by our ability to give one another a moment of pause. Listening to Understand and Listening to Allow Someone's Wisdom to Emerge mean letting go of your ego, of your attachment to what you think the conversation is: the outcome you want or the experience you’re hoping to have. It means paying attention and absorbing, asking questions, attuning yourself to what’s not being said explicitly. Giving someone permission to meander, to process, to discover.
Relationships are vital for human beings. The threads that connect us can be grounding, can reduce anxiety and depression, can give us the fortitude to thrive in a world in a constant state of change. This kind of being happens when our communication is detached from any preconceived notions about what can be acquired, and exists when we allow ourselves to be fully present with what unfolds as it unfolds. To be in communication means to listen, in a new way, to ourselves and others.